Equality Roundup

In our ongoing coverage of equality news, here's the latest from Texas and the Nation.

Gay man denied marriage lincense arrested for refusing to leave Dallas County Clerk's office.“They’re making us go to the back of the bus,” Major 'Mark' Jimenez said before being arrested by Dallas County Sheriff's Officers. “We’re treated like second-class citizens, and it has gone too far.”

Openly-gay woman nominated to U.S. District Court. President Obama nominatedPamela Chen, an openly-gay woman, to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York yesterday. If confirmed, Ms. Chen would become the second female Chinese-American and the fifth openly-gay individual to receive a lifetime judicial appointment.

Department of Homeland Security will consider same-sex relationships with American citizens in removal proceedings. A little more than one week after Democrats in Congress asked the Obama administration to adopt a specific policy that considers same-sex relationships with American citizens in determinations about whether to initiate removal proceedings of undocumented immigrants, a DHS spokesman told BuzzFeed yesterday that the department now considers, “whether an individual has close family ties to the United States as demonstrated by his or her same-sex marriage or other longstanding relationship to a United States citizen.”

New resource helps track Congressional positions on LGBT issues.The Human Rights Campaign just released a new searchable online database that shows the position of members of Congress on a range of LGBT issues. The database shows that 181 members of Congress, or 34 percent, support marriage equality.

Intolerance was on full display at Chick-fil-A's throughout the nation yesterday, as bigots and homophobes turned our in droves to show support for the greasy chicken chain's anti-gay stance on “Chick-fil-A appreciation day.” Chick fil-A posted “record setting” sales.

Same-sex family invites Chick-fil-A's Dan Cathy to dinner. A lesbian couple from Georgia has invited Dan Cathy to dinner. Marci Alt and her partner Marlysa would like to show Cathy that their family is like other American families. They also want him to know that Chick-fil-A's donations to anti-gay groups hurt families like theirs. From their invitation to Cathy:

Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy himself said that our LGBT-accepting culture suffers from a “deprived mind,” that marriage equality is “twisted up,” and that making marriage equality legal is “inviting God's judgment.” Mr. Cathy has his opinion, but he should hear from us and from fellow Christians who disagree – and he should know how his donations are hurting families here in Georgia. I'm inviting Chick-fil-A COO Dan Cathy and his family to join my family for dinner — at his place or ours — to see that we're just like any other American family. We care deeply about our faith, our family, our friends and our community, and think there's room to turn this debate into a dialogue.

Gay reparative 'therapists' to gays: you're probably going to hell. A homophobic splinter group of Exodus International, the organization of ministries which recently announced it would no longer support gay reparative therapy, released a statement of doctrine last week explaining that “homosexual practice” is immoral, and that “a sexually immoral life can get even self-professed Christians excluded from the kingdom of God.”